NY Review of Books: Shakespeare’s Unfilmable Dream.

It allows endless opportunity, IMHO. The first time I saw it performed, the cast had but a platform and costumes. And it was wonderful. I suppose one has to have an imagination, something that may be endangered in the days of Pixar and CGI ...

Electric Lit: Sunset and Sunrise on Bleak Horizons - The State of the Revisionist Western

EL calls this “evocative and deeply aware”: “Bleak horizon under a glazed sky, flat desert, clumps of sage, scrub, distant butte, lone rider. This is a land of sand, dry rocks, and dead things. Buzzard country. And he is migrating through it.”

Compare and contrast, Zane Grey, Wildfire: “Hers always then the mutable and immutable desert, the leagues and leagues of slope and sage and rolling ridge, the great canyons and the giant cliffs, the dark river with its mystic thunder of waters, the pine-fringed plateaus, the endless stretch of horizon, with its lofty, isolated, noble monuments, and the bold ramparts with their beckoning beyond! Hers always the desert seasons: the shrill, icy blast, the intense cold, the steely skies, the fading snows; the gray old sage and the bleached grass under the pall of the spring sand-storms; the hot furnace breath of summer, with its magnificent cloud pageants in the sky, with the black tempests hanging here and there over the peaks, dark veils floating down and rainbows everywhere, and the lacy waterfalls upon the glistening cliffs and the thunder of the red floods; and the glorious golden autumn when it was always afternoon and time stood still! Hers always the rides in the open, with the sun at her back and the wind in her face! And hers surely, sooner or later, the nameless adventure which had its inception in the strange yearning of her heart and presaged its fulfilment somewhere down that trailless sage-slope she loved so well!”

Literary Hub: The Joy of Throwing Away An Entire Novel.

“Was I sure there was nothing salvageable there? Was I giving up?” Every writer or blogger will know this feeling. I myself often fantasize about chucking this whole thing, wondering what phoenix would rise. Would I be happier? Freer? I chafe against the restrictions of the blog, locked in the same form-factor for a decade. Our blogs are becoming prisons, the dimensions dictated by the walled gardens elsewhere. Cam gave me hope with his new blog, and how it bodily and boldly breaks barriers. These functions should have been baked into blog software, years ago.

WaPo: Haunting chalkboard drawings, frozen in time for 100 years, discovered in Oklahoma school.

Book anomalies.

I’ve been hitting some new works at the Library, recently. And I think I’m finding a downside to authors who write on a computer. I’m seeing a ... well, there’s no nice way to say it. Cut-and-paste repetition. Someone says something, then a few paragraphs later, says exactly the same thing slightly paraphrased. I’ve found it in two recent books now. One does it continually in every chapter of the tome. Normally I’d blame bad editing ... and it *is* poor editing. But with the lowered margins in publishing these days, authors are having to wear many hats. Get someone else to read your stuff before it goes to press. Preferably a friend who isn’t a ‘yes person.’

Perhaps a renaissance of typewriters should be seriously considered; and as more than just a hipster ‘thing.’

ArtDaily: Napoleon’s last gift to his son - A superb pair of child-size pistols.

Medium: The 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidates’ Logos, Ranked.

Cursing doesn’t add to the hilarity. It’s enough to show the logos. Not a fan of H’s logo; straining for single letter/symbol memorability like O’s ... and failing. It’s just way too Playskool for my taste.

The Art of VFX: VFX Breakdown.

Poetry Foundation: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100.

This still represents sophomore year high school english class torture [15 years of age]; content for which we had absolutely no context. What did we know of ‘one-night cheap hotels’, ‘yellow fog’, ‘marmalade and tea’, ‘magic lanterns’? We had a grad student even play a vinyl record of Eliot reading it, in what seemed to be his asthmatic dotage. In our terms, “I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” became “I grow mold ... I grow mold ... I shall wear my fungus rolled.” I can still perform the imitation. The only experience worse than that, was the month spent having a monotone instructor insist on reading most of The Odyssey out loud. Sheer torture.

Some poetry should only be introduced when experience has had a chance to illuminate the subject matter.